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CWmike writes "Mozilla is on track to release Firefox 6 next week, according to notes posted on the company's website. 'On track with a few bugs still remaining. No concerns for Tuesday,' the notes stated. Firefox 6 includes several noticeable changes, including highlighting domain names in the address bar — both Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 do something similar by boldfacing domain names — and reducing startup time when users rely on Panorama, the browser's multi-tab organizer. Meanwhile, Mozilla said this week that starting with Firefox 8, Mozilla will automatically block browser add-ons until users approve them, which should put an end to sneaky installs."

I like the addon blocking feature but now I gotta go through all this repo-changing bullshit AGAIN to upgrade my Linux machines? I'm thinking of just using the.deb installers, it's looking like using repos isn't worth it for Firefox at this point...

I'm using FF8 alphas on the Nightly channel, which is part of the Moziila PPA in Ubuntu. It's fantastic. It uses way less memory and is way faster. It's also way stabler than nightlies were when I was running Moziila nightlies in 2001, and they were pretty good even then. The only downside is extensions that haven't caught up. If you're clear for those, I heartily recommend it.

I've been loving Firefox for years, but this fast release schedule is driving me nuts. Every time a new "major" version comes out now, at least one or two of my extensions break. The first one to go (on FF4) was Ubiquity, which still isn't fixed, and the stupid thing about that is Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs extension. It's pretty sad when their own damn extensions can't even keep up, let alone 3rd party stuff.

So, back to your point about extensions being the only downside, honestly, do we use Firefox for any other reason? I could have ditched FF for Chrome or even IE9 (shudder) but it's the extensions that make Firefox so awesome, and that's what's suffering the most with this bullshit release schedule.

*agreed*
I would ditch FF for Chrome too if it weren't for the extensions. Thus far all mine have been updated relatively quickly, but I can't help feeling that at some point in the future plugin developers are just gonna give up bothering.

Many of the extensions I use in FF are now available on Chrome, but I am coming round to the idea that extensions are not necessarily the best way to get what I want. The main aim of Chrome is to load and run web apps as fast as possible. In Firefox I use the Brief RSS reader add-on, but Chrome is meant to use RSS reading web apps like Google Reader.

I tried Google Reader a while back and preferred Brief. Similarly I tried Gmail and preferred Thunderbird. Now I have switched to Reader and Gmail because despi

Haha, so it seems like they decided to get rid of the initial "http://" in displayed urls as well as the trailing / on root urls. That is, if you're on the regular Slashdot home page, the full string displayed in the url bar is just slashdot.org. Copy-and-paste it somewhere and you still get http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org], though. Other protocols (including https) still include the protocol part.

The Windows version still has massive memory leaks. Before switching to Chrome for Windows and Linux...Firefox was lagging and not responding every 7-10 seconds...then catching up when it decided to do something. Thought it was my cable modem & squirrel eaten coax...but after getting Chrome...doesn't happen at all. Have used Firefox for years...but nothing this buggy needs to be allowed out into the open. Even IE8/9 doesn't pull this garbage.

I have to close Firebug anytime a heavy webpage (a huge table with sorting, like in a Drupal admin area, etc.). If I don't it locks up for several seconds anytime I try to leave that page. About 25% of those times it just hangs until I have to restart it.
It has made FF 3.6 look like the last version of FF for me... and I've been using it (or Mozilla before FF even existed) since the Netscape 6 debacle. Sorry guys - I hate the idea of Chrome as much as any privacy lover would, and I love certain addons (Ad

Sorry guys - I hate the idea of Chrome as much as any privacy lover would, and I love certain addons (Adblock/NoScript/Firebug/etc.), but as a web dev FF4+ just isn't cutting it. Unless one of these new version fix those issues, I have to leave FF behind. It's now wasting my time on the job.

Fortunately...I found many of the same addons for Chrome that I was using in FF. Don't get me wrong...have been using and am used to FF...but when I have to wait for my quad-core to catch up to whatever I'm doing in FF...something had to give...so went with Chrome and the problems went away.

Whenever I read that FF gets their act together and it starts acting like Chrome/Opera/IE...I will start using it again.

I'm currently using Aurora (v.7) for add-on compatibility as a convenience. I've not got much that doesn't work with it. Currently got Adblock Plus, Flashblock, Ghostery, HTTPS everywhere and Noscript working, so I'm happy. Hopefully it'll roll over to 8 soon.

Can you skip version 6, or are they going to pull another asshole "Firefox 5 is EOLed because v6 is out" like they did to Firefox 4?

Or do you mean you're sticking with Firefox 3.6? Because that seems like a good idea these days, at least until they figure out that their "rapidly release schedule" isn't actually helping anything and is just ensuring that no one gives a shit about new Firefox releases any more.

Or do you mean you're sticking with Firefox 3.6? Because that seems like a good idea these days, at least until they figure out that their "rapidly release schedule" isn't actually helping anything and is just ensuring that no one gives a shit about new Firefox releases any more.

Google only supports the last 3 versions of a browser. With FF6, that means Google's only going to support FF4, FF5 and FF6. FF3.6 won't work with Google Apps and other stuff anymore (seriously, I tried using G+ with FF3.5, and it demanded I upgrade - supported browsers are 3.6, 4 and 5 then).

And when will Mozilla stop screwing around with the UI? FF5 screwed up the tab bar if you have a bunch of tabs and close them right->left since the now-rightmost tab doesn't scroll right - your mouse just has an empty space.

Google only supports the last 3 versions of a browser. With FF6, that means Google's only going to support FF4, FF5 and FF6. FF3.6 won't work with Google Apps and other stuff anymore (seriously, I tried using G+ with FF3.5, and it demanded I upgrade - supported browsers are 3.6, 4 and 5 then).

Well, shit, because I still have a PowerPC Mac on my desk. It's stuck with Firefox 3.6 because they dropped PowerPC support in Firefox 4. So I guess that means it's time to move over to Safari for it. I suppose I can't complain too much on that one, but it's annoying having a perfectly functional Mac that's going to get warehoused because no one will compile software for it any more. Actually it's Apple dropping support for Mac OS X 10.5 that will force the issue: as soon as an unpatched security issue is f

TenFourFox is a great product, the problem as time goes on is outdated plug-ins. Flash is stuck at 10.1 and horribly slow on PPC (it used to not be like that, thanks Adobe!), and Java updates will soon end.

There's an extension called User Agent Switcher. Setting it to mimic a recent version of Firefox causes problems for some reason, but if you set it to mimic a recent version of Opera, suddenly everything works just fine. (Disclaimer: I haven't tested this with every single feature of every single Google service in existence; but it works with everything that I *have* tried.)

Twitter no longer works with Firefox 2 as of about a week ago (ever since they made the Big Stupid Change that puts acres of whitespace between adjascent tweets), but I haven't managed to find a browser that the new version *does* work with (and, being a web developer, I have like fifteen different browsers installed for testing; you'd think they could manage to support at least of them, but no), so phooey on Twitter.

> And when will Mozilla stop screwing around with the UI?

When pigs fly, I think. As near as I can tell, user expectations got changed over from something that Firefox wanted to meet to something that Firefox specifically wants to break, sometime around version 1.5. The gratuitous UI changes were minor at first (little things like the first round of changes to how bookmarks work), but the growth rate of their significance appears to be geometric: if rearranging the order of the standard buttons (back, forward, reload, stop -- not that the stop button in Firefox has EVER worked correctly) wasn't new and interesting enough for you, hold on to your seat, because in version three we're completely altering how the location bar works, and then version four changes the whole top of the browser window around so much you won't even recognize it.

Soon we'll be doing away with the tired old "back button" concept, ranking the pages in your history by their *popularity* (as determined by other users), and presenting them visually as part of Panorama. Also, "scrolling down" will be replaced with "zooming in", which you can do with multi-touch trackpad gestures, and manually-created bookmarks will be phased out in favor of assigning ratings (one, two, three, four, or five stars) to the items in your history, which informs your search results when you use the Awesomeness Bar. The bookmarks toolbar will obviously be going away, and also bookmark keywords, and the tab bar will be merged into the Awesomeness bar as well, so instead of having a bar of tabs that you can switch to, you can just use the Awesomeness Bar to search through your open tabs just like you would search through your history.

(Am I just being stupidly absurd? If you'd told me in 2000 about all the changes in Firefox 3, 4, and 5, I'd have said you were being stupidly absurd. I mean, really, getting rid of the menu bar? Putting the home button clear over to the right of the search box? Integrating bookmarks with history? No browser maker could EVER think those would be good ideas. Oh, wait. They did.)

If you don't like the FF UI design choices, that's your opinion, and you are entitled to it. But why the anger? Plenty of other people do like those choices, and they are entitled to their opinion too.

Me, I don't care. I only care that my browser is 100% open source regardless of UI (well, within reason. But so far nothing every truly annoyed me).

The comments on this article are actually the first I've ever heard of Panorama. Now what does that say about this "feature"?

Oh yes, I actually tried it. It took all of 10 seconds to convince me to remove that button from the tab bar again.

Sometimes, a product simply is mature. There's no point in adding bells&whistles just because you can. I would rather prefer they finish HTML5, CSS3 and SVG support and other standards implementations.

I can't fathom what Mozilla are thinking either. Google have a clear goal with Chrome: make access to pages as fast as possible. Chrome does that very well. Firefox, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any direction other than to fuck up its user's workflow as much as possible with each release because "disruptive" is a popular buzzword at the moment.

Changing the UI affects add-on developers too. When the status bar went away any add-on which put an icon down there instantly broke and a few of the ones

1. Google Chrome is the best browser in the world. It is much better than Firefox has ever been or probably ever will be. If we are really, really lucky and work very, very hard maybe someday we could make Firefox just as good as Chrome. To improve Firefox all we have to do is copy everything Google does.

2. Even MSIE is better than Firefox. Let's copy that browser too insofar as it doesn't interfere wit

Can you skip version 6, or are they going to pull another asshole "Firefox 5 is EOLed because v6 is out" like they did to Firefox 4?

Chrome and Firefox only support a single stable version at a time. Every time a new version of Chrome or Firefox comes out, future security fixes apply only to that version - there are no further updates to previous versions.

So you can skip a version of Chrome or Firefox, but you will be running a browser that isn't getting security updates. It would just be for 6 weeks, but I wouldn't risk it.

If you don't like that, your other options are the slower release schedules of IE, Opera and Safari.

I'd rather they add some easy way to let users install addons that say, "Does not support Firefox x.x". They can put a big disclaimer/warning/alert to make sure the user knows what they are doing, but with the Firefox rapid release schedule I am tired of having my addons break because of version string issues.

One example is the Stylish addon. I am using the Firefox 6 beta in Ubuntu 11.10 alpha and Stylish refuses to install due to the version string. The addon info says it supports Firefox 3.6 - 6.0a2 (key part being "6.0.a2"). That tells me that it should work in later alpha/beta version 6 builds.

Firefox really needs to address the issue of how addons determine whether or not they are out-of-date. The browser version is no longer a useful metric for that.

".....to report whether they still work or are having some issues with alpha and beta releases. Note: Recommended for alpha and beta users only!
in other words, not for anyone who is interested in maintaining a production stable system.

This is just a reporter and not a thorough one at that. But the original poster also pointed out FF needs good UI for letting old addons run.

Despite it's name, Add-on Compatibility Reporter also allows you to disable add-on version checking using a reasonable UI.

If you think about it for a minute, disabling version checking is a requirement, as it would be impossible for you to check if an add-on still works with the new version of Firefox if the add-on was disabled because of version checking.

Google Toolbar still doesn't officially support Firefox 5, but works just fine with version checking turned off. Since Google applications only support 3

Actually, some addons will still not load even with compatibility reporter enabled. The Cooliris addon, for example, simply displays "This addon is not compatible with ". Amusingly, it still gives you the option to report that it still works (despite the fact that Firefox/Aurora/Nightly have forcibly disabled it).

It is probably more aimed at commercial entities installing their crap without asking, rather than malware authors. That way something that causes instability will at least have be mentioned to the user reducing the risk of Firefox itself being blamed - like an extension to the facility already present to disable extensions that are know to cause instability.

While a malware author won't think twice about hacking around such a measure, a "legitimate" company will if they think doing so will create an oppo

No, what they're going to do is change how add-on registration works in each release, and release a new version every week. This should confuse the hell out of the malware authors, and isn't actually any more work for the firefox maintainers than the current release schedule, which is almost as frequent...

I suppose it's no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to Firefox development for the past several years, but for fuck's sake, listen to your users and stop with the version number inflation!

Seriously, what makes this a Firefox 6 and not a Firefox 4.2? What new features does it add? Apparently the only really "stand-out" feature is graying out anything that isn't the domain name in the useless-bar. I mean, Awesome Bar.

(Seriously, I like the concept, but I've had quite a few instances this past week where instead of finding "the page I was just on five minutes ago" it does something like "page 3 of this article you read two months ago" with no hint of the URL I'd opened literally ten times already that day. Awesome. Here's an idea, can Firefox try and fix it to make it useful? Like sort based on number of times a page was viewed, counting reloads, so that typing the URL to a forum doesn't find page 2, 3, 4, and 5, but never page 1 because I don't click on the page 1 link enough, I just reload the forum?)

But back to the version number issue - quick, how many people know what version number Chrome is up to off the top of their head? Anyone?

How many people using Firefox 5 here have literally forgotten that they're using Firefox 5, because the last really major update was Firefox 4? I still think of it as "Firefox 4" because it looks identical, and have to be reminded that they've inflated the version number for no useful reason.

Seriously, stop blindly aping Chrome! If you're going to copy something Chrome does, try and understand it! For example, take removing the status bar. Chrome will expand the little URL popup that replaced the status bar if you continue hovering a link. Firefox 4 and 5 don't. And for some reason they randomly switch between left-aligning it and right-aligning the popup. And for fuck's sake, why don't you just expand the popup to fill the entire horizontal width of the window?! I've got the room to display the entire URL! Why doesn't Firefox bother doing so?!

But kudos for aping (poorly) the feature in IE 9 that warns when third party addons have been installed and gives you the option of not using them. It's nice to know that you're going to go ahead and do that after crying about how it's impossible to do, even after IE had launched with that feature.

I suppose it's no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to Firefox development for the past several years, but for fuck's sake, listen to your users and stop with the version number inflation!

A few stories under this is a story about Chrome 14. I am sure the comments there are saying the same thing. But can we move on already?

Yes, Chrome and Firefox release a major version every 6 weeks. Chrome and Firefox raise the major version number every such time. And here on Slashdot people complain about those browsers doing it. But the vast majority of Chrome and Firefox users just use the browser, and don't care.

If you don't like what Chrome and Firefox are doing, feel free to use another browser

Did you just write a whole essay on an arbitrary and meaningless version number?

It may be arbitrary and meaningless now but it didn't use to be.

It used to be that a move from Major->Major meant that there would be large changes and there's a good chance addons would break. Changes to minor versions might break addons, and patches shouldn't.

Now, who the fuck knows? The number's meaningless. No one cares about Chrome's version number, because it's meaningless.

Firefox's version number used to convey information, and now it doesn't. They've taken something useful and made it useless.

I actually just scrolled up and read your line bashing the AwesomeBar. Great. How many years has it been now? And you still don't understand how it's used or why it's useful?

Really? It's supposed to find infrequently read sites? Or sites that you've only read once? Because before it finds Slashdot, it finds some random article I read months ago.

Before it finds a website that I had repeatedly had to go back to over the course of a day, it found page 2 of some article I read a month ago. Actually, it found several random articles that had nothing to do with the site I was trying to pull up. Enough that scrolling through the entire list meant that, despite the fact I'd opened it, say, five times already, it wasn't on the list. At all.

And I can guarantee you the thing with me trying to reopen a forum only to find that the Awesome bar found nothing but either page 2 or beyond and random threads on the forum happened. Despite the fact that I'd bookmarked the forum. I thought that was supposed to promote it to the top of the search, but apparently not.

Of course, I wouldn't need to reopen it if Firefox hadn't randomly decided not to restore my tabs, but that's a different issue...

I won't disagree on the version inflation, but I've no idea how you manage to pull off the rest.

At this point, I only need to type "a" to get Wolfram|Alpha as my first link, which is exactly what I want it to do. The bar works perfectly well for all other links I might need. Likewise, I've never had trouble with restoring and FF only very rarely crashes, 99% of the time because of Flash.

For one, it breaks compatibility with extensions, since they normally will say "I'm compatible with Firefox 3.*" because normally when the major version number stays the same, things wont break. This is a fairly standard software practice. Firefox 4, 5, and 6 should have been called 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2, since they were only minor revisions, and do not break compatibility. So then when there's Firefox version 4 through version 392 (if they even make it that far), it's impossible to know which break compatibili

That's not my point. Previously, when a minor revision came out, it wouldn't break the extension, and the extension says it is still compatible. Now, even if the extension is compatible, the extension might only be marked as being compatible with 5.*. So when 6 comes out, even though the extension should still work, the browser will mark is as incompatible and forcibly disable it. Unless you have NTT installed, you cannot use that plugin until the maintainer updates the compatibility for his extension.

Spoken like a guy that doesn't mind repeating history. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.

If we assume all new changes are good ones, and all new versions are backwards compatible with whatever came before, then we wouldn't care what version we are on now. Except they aren't, so we do. If a site, or an app is know to work with one version, then every change means regression testing to see if the new one works too. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. If you are of the Programmer Full Employment mindset that

If we assume all new changes are good ones, and all new versions are backwards compatible with whatever came before

Don't assume that.

Assume that all new versions should be compatible except for specific announced incompatibilities. Also assume that all new versions are not compatible where you stand to lose anything of value until you've tested them.

FF6 has a new Tools > Developer submenu, and they moved Error Console, View Source and Web Console there. Moving View Source there was a big surprise. Any reasonable developer might get totally freaked out searching high and low for View Source if they didn't know about that move.

In case you missed it, Web Console in FF5+ is like the console in Firebug when you have it set to enter JS commands at the bottom of the pane. But the difference is, Web Console is always available. It's not a plug-in like Firebug. So it's something you can count on, even if you upgrade and Firebug breaks in the new version.

I still haven't gotten Firefox 5 completely back to the old 3.6 look and feel, which was more workable and required fewer button clicks. The last nagging issue is the one that Firefox no longer displays in the drop-down the history of links in the current tab, so you can't quickly go back to the top of a rabbit trail that you started down. Sometimes that was my only way out of stupid sites that disable the back button.
Oh, and the Federal Student Aid site (FAFSA.gov) only supports Firefox 3.5 and 3.6, one of which is no longer supported by FF and the other of which will also soon be not supported.

Firefox 3.6.19 forever! I am now treating Firefox like an abandoned application. Google developers have now taken over. It may still be the best current browser due to its useful extensions, but it is like a bad copy of Chrome and imho inferior to Firefox 3.6.19 in most ways.

If I had to choose between Chrome and Firefox 4+, I really don't know what I would choose. Despite the horrible interface and all the badly implemented Chrome-ness Firefox 4+ still has unique functionality in the form of extensions like NoScript, Adblock Plus, and Scrapbook. They contain functionality that I just cannot live without and I haven't seen 100% replicated in any other browser. So I would probably be forced to stick with Firefox 4+ even though I prefer Chrome, Opera, and even MSIE in terms of the interface and usability etc.

Sure Chrome has NotScript, but it just doesn't work very well compared to NoScript. It's not a viable replacement. I ended up using the built in javascript whitelisting functionality which was a huge PITA. It was like going back to IE4 when I had to manually add sites to security zones by actually typing in the URLs.

If it some point a critical security flaw is found in Firefox 3.6.19 complete with exploits in the wild I may reluctantly migrate to Opera. Or maybe by that time someone will have forked Firefox 3.6.19 to at least apply security fixes as needed.

As of today Firefox 3.6.19 is still downloadable for Windows and Mac OS X and is available as a binary in the repositories of both of the Linux distros I use: ArchLinux and TinyCore.

For businesses and users worried about the fast update cycle of Firefox, perhaps they could consider using SeaMonkey. And, if they don't want SeaMonkey's chat and e-mail, perhaps they could make a fork of it, strip the unwanted features and... oh, wait!

I'm not totally opposed to the fast development cycle but I think Mozilla could step down the version numbering pace a few notches. e.g. release a new update every 6 weeks, but call it Firefox N.x+1 or N.x.y+1 instead of Firefox N+1 (Firefox 5 would be 4.1

Why did it take the developers this long to realize that people may not want a bunch a crap added to Firefox without their permission? Blocking the addition of features without express consent of the user should have been the default setting from the very beginning.

Well, they have established a committee with which to take feedback. I mean, what more could they possibly do? I mean it's not like they can't just stop giving new releases stupid version numbers without forming up a committee.

What sites are you going to where your browser is soaking 7GB... I've never seen FF run over 800MB, though that is too high imho. However, never really had an issue with it, though I've been using Chrome as my primary for about a year.

I can answer that. Go to video sites that are NOT Youtube, like most of the 'Ow my balls!" kind of dumb vid sites? watch FF suck down memory like a wino sucking down MD 20/20. The Chormium based and IE seem to give mem back when you close tabs, FF? Not so much.

I have also seen cases where I had left FF running and went off to do something else and forgot about it and several hours later come back and memory had JUMPED a good 30-40%! Again it seems to be tied to whether or not you had played any videos that

Some plugins and addons use/leak lots of memory. I notice Firebug makes firefox bloat up a lot, so I generally don't have firebug or disable it.Anyway I run chrome, firefox (and IE sometimes), and chrome uses a lot of memory too - the difference is chrome tends to have multiple processes, so you don't see one big fat process, but you get multiple processes which add up to about the same thing. But it's easier to free up memory with chrome - since if you close one chrome process, the memory is freed up by th

What other systems? That covers every version of Windows still supported! If you mean Linux well duh, who is gonna do the extra work to support a 1% share OS that is a royal PITA to support? Do you support Apt or RPM? Will the version you just released work with the kernel that came out yesterday, or will you have to start over again because Linus Goatse'd the kernel for fun?

It is based on Chromium so it is FOSS, I'm sure if you look around their website you'll find the code. if you are on Linux I'm sure yo

I'm probably pissing in the wind responding to an AC but here goes anyway. I've used Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.6. I've run Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox on Windows 2000 Pro, Red Hat/Gnome, on Pentium III and Pentium 4 systems. Firefox has always had an appetite for memory but I've never observed the kind of consumption you describe. I've loaded the high res HST image of the Helix Nebula with the intent of breaking Firefox and it didn't break. It just used seven hundred meg and wow, none of the memory leaked, it was all released when I closed the tab. I've opened two dozen posts on/. in separate tabs. I've opened a dozen tabs on a dozen windows and every time I closed them most all of the memory was released. So prove it. Download Sysinternals Process Explorer or something comparable for your OS and show us a screen shot that documents this claim.

Nobody's saying it *leaks* memory. It just uses tons of it, especially on javascript- and video-heavy sites, and hangs inexplicably for seconds at a time. Loading up some giant images or only running 15 tabs isn't going to do much of anything in any browser.

There's a lot of people using the word "leak" probably without understanding the contextual meaning. I've never denied that Firefox uses a lot of memory but even back when I was running nightly builds during the v3 development cycle I didn't see the kind of memory consumption often claimed here at/. or Mozillazine. Your post made me realize that my test was tainted. Sometime in the recent past I began using Noscript to keep those pesky scripts from shoveling malware onto my system. Noscript can be

Could it be that Moz is using the Intel compiler? Because my exp is the opposite of yours but I am using AMD CPUs. If one doesn't set very specific flags on the Intel compiler it puts out crippled code for all but certain Intel approved CPUs. I have also noticed FF seems to behave a little better on X64 than X32 which may also explain why you aren't seeing it.

I can say on the AMD nettop I'm typing this on FF is unsuitable for purpose and has been since the 3.6.x branch due to CPU spikes and memory sucka

It's really worrisome, because it seems to be part of a much larger trend, that of FOSS software in general going downhill, and basically self-destructing.

Just look at the situation with Linux desktops, where both Ubuntu (by far the most popular distro) and Gnome have decided to abandon their users in an attempt to woo ADHD teenagers who do nothing but play games and browse Facebook. The other big desktop, KDE, hasn't gone the dumb-down route like those, but it hasn't really improved much in 10 years eithe

It seems to me very much like Wayland is simple by virtue of making all the hard parts Someone Else's Problem. Want network transparency? Someone else will write an application to send individual windows over the network, and figure out a way of dealing with the fact that Wayland apps require OpenGL ES which doesn't run very fast in software and isn't designed to run over RDP. Of course, every application will have to add seperate code paths for it because Wayland uses the DRI device interface directly with

I'm very skeptical. With things like this, major features such as this generally need to be designed it at the beginning, they can't just be bolted on after-the-fact and expected to work well. Even if it's not implemented until later, it needs to be designed into the specification from the start. It's like designing a human launch system like STS or Ares and not bothering to design in the return trip until later.

I think the big question that regular Linux users have is: how is my current ability to do "ssh -X" going to change when Wayland takes over? Right now, with any X application (which is pretty much every Unix graphical app), I can run applications remotely, these days usually over ssh for security. I don't have to worry about whether the application was written to do this or not, as every X application has this ability.

What a mistake! Firefox 5 hasn't improved at all. The memory leaks are still there, and they're far worse now. I used it for a couple of hours, and its memory use was over 7 GB. Luckily, I've got 16 GB, so 7 GB wasn't that painful. Still, it was totally unacceptable for a web browser to ever use that much memory.
The performance pales in comparison to Chrome, Safari, and even IE. It felt slow, while the others feel fast and responsive.

I notice you didn't mention konqueror. Does that mean you use (64bit) Windows? There is no 64bit windows version of FF5. Maybe you saw 7MB of RAM used and were confused? IIRC, a 32bit app can't address 7GB of RAM no matter how many bits the OS supports.

I'm always suprised when I see reports like this because on my computer (4GB RAM, Ubuntu 10.04 or Windows 7 Home Premium), Firefox and Chrome are pretty comparable memory-wise and Chrome is slightly faster, but only by a little. I very rarely have more than 10 tabs open, mostly documentation type stuff, not to many images or flash, and I've never seen a browser take up more than a couple hundred megs of memory. I'm definitly not calling bullshit on anyone who says this, but what I am wondering is if Firef

Of the competitors, only Chrome is open. And while it seems like a fine browser, and I keep it around to check web-page rendering in WebKit, I can't stand it for normal usage for a pile of reasons:

The upstream packaging tries to install a new sources.list entry and cron-update itself. *Bad* software, don't mess with my package management, no biscuit. Fortunately Chromium doesn't do anything that crazy.

Chrome desperately wants to pretend that all monitors have 96 DPI, so I have to lie to it and say I want much bigger fonts than I do, just to get something readable. This also means that sites can't use CSS lengths like "8.5in" and get something actually 8.5 inches wide on my screen.

Chrome ignores all of my system font configuration that says how to render fonts, producing blurry fonts so bad they literally make my eyes water. (It does Mac-style blurry anti-aliasing, whereas the rest of my system does anti-aliasing that produces crisp lines.)

Chrome downloads and shows ads on the "new tab" page by default.

Chrome zooms images and text together, with no option to just make text bigger and leave images un-blurry.

It's doubtful that Firefox will be relevant much beyond mid-2012. It's already sliding into irrelevancy. It is becoming the XFree86 of the browser world.

I don't think that's really a valid analogy. XFree86 became irrelevant because it was forked. Most of the devs moved to the fork, leaving the old version to one or two guys who refused to give up, the fork was rapidly improved, all the distros switched to the fork, and now no one remembers the original project much. Of course, X.org is about to be abando